


i'm trying to ignore the skyline

by ghostbandaids



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Foster Family, Alternate Universe - Wings, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Injury, Child Abuse, Dadza, Dark, Depressed TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family Bonding, Family Dynamics, Foster Care, Gen, Gunshot Wounds, Hurt/Comfort, Manipulation, Phoenixes, Protective Parent Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), Suicidal Thoughts, Temporary Character Death, Tommy needs a hug, Trust Issues, Wingfic, everyone has wings, sbi, tommy is a phoenix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-17 08:22:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28722075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostbandaids/pseuds/ghostbandaids
Summary: It hurt. It hurt so bad that he wondered how he wasn’t dead already. A voice in the back of his head told him that he hadn’t lost enough blood.He wanted to burn. He wanted to be ashes. He wanted it to all go away.A wingfic where phoenixes are held captive, and Tommy is one. He's almost given up hope when he finds the people that might become his family, the people who might be able to save him.
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s), Toby Smith | Tubbo & TommyInnit, Wilbur Soot & Technoblade & TommyInnit & Phil Watson
Comments: 202
Kudos: 2080
Collections: Completed fics I read, Found family to make me feel something, MCYT Fic Rec, Myct wing ficssssss





	1. Falling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If any ccs are uncomfortable with this kind of work, it will be removed. Title from _La Jolla_ , Wilbur Soot
> 
> Alright y'all buckle in! This fic is actually fully written and edited (about 19.5k) but I'm going to post it in chapters over the next couple of days. 
> 
> There will be dark content throughout the piece, particularly in this chapter. CW: child abuse (verbal/physical), graphic injuries, temporary death, suicidal ideation. 
> 
> I wrote this while listening to minecraft songs because they make me so nostalgic that I cry.

Tommy’s parents had smiled at him.

He remembered that much.

They’d played music on a record player and spun him around, letting his wings fill with air so that he could feel the lift of flight to come. His mom had flown him over the ocean, her grip so tight that he never once feared falling. His father had read him books in the light of the lamp in their small, one-bedroom house. And they’d been happy. 

The problem with childhood memories was that time managed to obscure the things that must have been important: what his mother looked like, what his father sounded like when he was reading, the things that they’d told him in the voice one used when talking to a child. And he tried, he tried so hard to remember these things, wracking his mind for just a sliver of information about who had once loved him. 

But he couldn’t remember. Eventually, he gave up.

It was enough to know that they’d smiled, that they’d laughed. 

There was only one memory that he couldn’t get rid of, no matter how hard he tried. The kind of that snuck in while he was trying to work or slipped into his dreams where he was forced to relive it more nights than not. 

It started with a walk by the ocean.

The breeze played with his unruly hair as he pumped his short legs to keep up with his parents. The gravel underfoot was slick with sea-spray but with their hands to hold and his wings to flap for balance, he managed to stay upright. 

The soft pink-red of sunset washed the clouds and bled down into the rushing waves of the ocean. 

He hated this part of the dream because his mother would point her finger out to a bird in the sky and ask if he could see it and even though she was looking right at him, her face would blur as if it was in movement. Unrecognizable. Then she would start walking again and his chance to see her would be gone. 

The dark-colored wings of his parents  _ — _ he’d never been sure what species they’d were  _ — _ fluttered behind them as they walked and he looked forward to the day that his wings were as strong, as powerful. At the moment, they were tiny and covered by a fuzzy, black down. 

They settled at the top of one of the sea cliffs for stargazing  _ — _ his mother had brought a picnic basket and a newspaper, his father a telescope. Even with wings, there were parts of the sky that most people could only observe. 

He plopped down on the blanket. Maybe later, they would take him flying. 

He loved flying. 

He didn’t blame them for what happened next. He didn’t really blame them for anything. 

His father liked to stargaze in peace and his mum was busy reading some story, but Tommy itched to do something. He inched off the blanket quietly so that he wouldn’t disturb them.

Then he saw something near him, a little light, a star of his own: a firefly!

He wanted to catch it and bring it back to his parents so he ran with hands outstretched towards the little flame of a bug. 

It drifted out of reach, taunting him. 

He lunged forward in a final, desperate attempt to catch it and succeeded in trapping it in his hands. 

Then he slipped, felt his feet slide off the cliff and into nothingness. No hands to hold, nothing that he could grab onto. He tumbled down into the blackness, spreading his wings with the innocent thought that maybe he’d be able to fly, that maybe the wind would lift him away from the sea and into the clouds.

In the darkness, he’d reached the edge of the cliff without even realizing it, without his parents noticing his absence at all.

They noticed his screams though, and plunged off the edge without a second thought in an attempt to catch him. His father knocked over the telescope and broke its glass lens as he dropped towards the sound of Tommy’s voice. 

They weren’t quite fast enough. 

Tommy hit the rocks below and the sound of the thump reverberated from the cliffs. His parents hit the ground beside him, ran to him, his mother sobbing and his father’s face frozen in a look of disbelief. 

“Tommy,” his mother sobbed. “My Tommy.” She cradled his head, slick with something warm. 

He hurt. Even in the dreams, it was still the worst pain he’d ever felt. 

As his eyes slid shut, the last thing that he saw was not his parents, but the firefly that had been released from his hands and now floated in the sky above him. A small flame, a glowing light.

“Wake up!” he heard his mother scream. His head grew hotter and hotter and his chest felt as though it was about to light on fire. 

In the moment, Tommy hadn’t understood what was happening, why he felt like a fire was blazing in his body. In his dreams, he dreaded what came after the fall, dreaded having to relive the pain. 

The sensation of burning consumed him, going from the feeling of sitting too close to a fire to sitting in it. Maybe he was screaming but it was hard to tell amidst the roar in his head; all he could feel was the rush of heat. 

And then there was a popping in his ears and a taste of ash in his mouth and nothing hurt anymore.

He heard a distant scream from his mother but only felt warmth and a feeling of peace like everything was going to be alright. 

And he was alright, or at least he thought it was. When he opened his eyes and felt something ashy covering his body, he brushed it off with his stubby fingers and sat up, spitting to try and get the taste of it out of his mouth. 

He hoped that they wouldn’t be mad at him for not being careful.

They stared at him and didn’t say anything and he didn’t know what it meant. Was he in trouble? Their wings bristled and fluffed. 

A newspaper that had been blown off the cliff with the gusts of air from their frantic dives fluttered to the ground near where Tommy was sitting, flattening against the rocks, slick with sea-spray. 

At the time, he didn’t know how to read, wasn’t even old enough to go to school. It hadn’t seemed like a relevant detail of the memory for years. Now though, the words were like blows that hit their mark hard.

_ Family and Friends of Phoenix Persecuted for Avoidance of the Agency _

“A phoenix,” his father murmured, horrified.

“A phoenix,” his mother wailed. 

It sounded like they were mourning him but Tommy didn’t understand. Why were they sad? He was fine, not even a scratch. For a second he’d thought he was hurt but then his head got all hot and fuzzy and now he was better.

“I’m all good!” he yelled, jumping up and running over to them in case they were worried about him. 

His mom flinched.

His dad ran a gentle hand over Tommy’s wings and Tommy watched in confusion as a couple of sparks flew out.

“More fireflies?” he asked, staring at the rising sparks with wonder.

“No,” his dad answered gruffly. 

They walked up the cliff quietly, his parents squeezing his hands but talking over his head in hushed whispers. 

“They won’t find out, we’ll keep him hidden,” his mother said.

“They always find out,” his father answered.

“Are you suggesting that we turn him in?” she asked. 

“I’m just saying that I don’t want to lose both of you. It’s what the Agency’s made for.”

“Would we be able to see him?” she said, sounding like Tommy did when he had a bad cold. 

“See who?” he asked from below them. “Grandpa?” He hoped that they were going to see his grandparents  _ — _ a surprise for him or something. They didn’t reply.

“No,” his father said. “But he’s young. He won’t remember us enough to be sad anyway.”

“I’m not going to give away my son when he’s done nothing wrong!” his mom said. Oh. They were talking about him. 

“They’ll keep him safe, safer than we’ll be able to when the sparking gives him away.”

His mom was quiet. 

“Do you want him to live in danger?” his father asked.

“No,” she said after a long pause. 

His father was wrong. He never stopped missing them, even as their faces and voices faded away. That only made it worse. 

The weeks following that memory were less specific, passing in a blur of car rides, promises of an adventure, sterile clinic lights. A doctor spread one of his wings to examine it and snatched his hand back when he accidentally touched one of Tommy’s sparks. 

Somewhere in that rush, his parents said goodbye and he was made to sleep in a small, white room all alone. He cried sometimes and asked why they wouldn’t come back and hold him again.

“Because you’re a very special young man,” a nurse answered.

“I don’t want to be special!” he yelled, frustrated, in response. It didn’t make a difference. He never saw them again.

“A is for Apple,” one of the caretakers read to the gathered group of children from a book they’d heard many times before. “And B is for Bear.” Tommy leaned towards her, trying to take in everything that she told the group. It was important that he knew all about things like reading and writing for when his parents came back. That way he could make them proud. 

He still waited for them to open every door and wave from every window he stood at.

“I think that she wrote the word wrong,” a boy with dark hair whispered to Tommy. “That doesn’t look like apple to me.”

Tommy squinted but couldn’t find any mistakes.

“Maybe you’re reading it wrong,” he whispered back.

“I think that I do that a lot,” the boy replied glumly. “I keep failing all of my tests.” 

The caretaker glared at their whispering but kept reading.

“Are you any good at adding?” Tommy asked the boy. 

“Yeah! I just use my fingers to do it, want me to show you?” the boy said. 

“If you can help me with math I’ll help you with reading.”

“Deal,” the boy said. “My name’s Tubbo.”

And then the caretaker did shush them but the damage was already done; the ball of their friendship had started to roll. 

“You’re telling me that you don’t know why we’re here?” Tubbo exclaimed one night over their shared homework.

“No.” Tommy glared. “My parents are coming back to get me soon anyway. You’re probably here because you can’t read or something.”

“If that was true they would help me read better, but they don’t,” Tubbo said, scribbling through another misspelled word. “We’re here because we’re different.”

“What kind of different?” Tommy asked.

“Have you ever thought you got hurt really bad but then you were fine?” Tubbo asked. Tommy remembered the night at the cliff, the firefly and the rush of falling and being okay. He remembered the feeling of flames even when he tried not to. He nodded.

“I was hit by a car when I was really little but something happened and then I was okay again,” Tubbo told him. “And my parents didn’t know how I wasn’t hurt when the driver brought me inside, so they took me to a doctor.”

“What happened?” Tommy asked, leaning towards the other boy. Tubbo’s story seemed like his own. 

“He called me a phoenix.”

The caretakers were careful to keep the children in the nursery unaware, but the truth slowly trickled in.

Information and knowledge were as much a currency as anything.

“I’ll trade you a fact about phoenixes for your applesauce,” one boy would say to another. 

Or, “If you tell me a story about what having parents was like you can have my sandwich.” 

They were all on a mission to remember what it was like to be loved and to figure out what had stolen that love away from them. 

Tommy and Tubbo did their best to compile all the information they bought or overheard, building a rudimentary understanding of what they were. It went like this:

Everyone in the world had wings. Tommy’s parents had strong, dark ones. Tubbo remembered his parents having wings that were huge and white like those of barn owls. Some wings were more rare than others, but they could all be used to fly. Living without wings was one of the worst things of all. 

Some wings were more common than others  _ — _ everyone knew a pigeon from somewhere  _ — _ but others were rare, some to the point that having them meant being at risk for kidnapping.

And having the wings of a phoenix, there was nothing more dangerous than that. 

Because the only thing that a phoenix could die from was old age. They could be killed over and over again and rise from the ashes unchanged each time, wings sparking. 

Everyone wanted to capture one and nothing was worth more on the black market. 

If parents found out that their child was a phoenix, they were required to turn them in to the Agency, a place where phoenixes would be kept safe. And parents refused, the consequences were hefty. 

They didn’t know what the Agency did besides hold them inside its walls. They were just kids, trading nursery rhymes and arguing over the last chocolate milk. Fighting to be held by the nurses, craving the attention that they would have gotten from their parents. 

One by one, they started to grow in their primary feathers, the feathers that meant flight. 

At night, Tubbo and Tommy would preen each other, pulling out the loose down so that the new ones would have space to fill in, only occasionally wincing and batting hands. 

Months of exercises for wing strengthening  _ — _ in which Tommy had complained incessantly  _ — _ finally paid off when he was the first one to lift off the ground in flight training. Tubbo’s proud face was almost enough, but he couldn’t stop thinking about showing his parents. 

His parents that would come back any day now. 

After that first day of hovering, the nurses had to use a full arsenal of threats and rewards to coax him out of the atrium. Even on his way to the cafeteria and the bedroom, he would propel himself forward with wing flaps instead of moving his legs. 

Flying felt like being free. Flying felt like a promise that there would never be another cliff that he couldn’t save himself from. 

He coached Tubbo each night until the other boy was able to lift himself off the ground too. It wasn’t long before they graduated into complicated spirals and tight dives, twisting around each other in the atrium’s obstacle course. 

And he missed his parents, but he almost forgot about them in the air.

It was when they turned ten that everything went to shit.

“Tommy. Tommy! Get up!” He woke to Tubbo’s hands shaking him insistently, the sun barely rising outside their small window. Tubbo had always been an early riser but usually he appreciated their friendship enough to give Tommy a couple extra minutes of sleep. 

“What is it?” he mumbled while pulling his blanket over his head and trying to plug his ears. 

“There’s someone here! Someone to talk to us, the nurses said.”

Tommy shot straight up, his heart racing. 

“A parent?” he asked. Maybe they were finally going home. 

“No,” Tubbo said. “An important-looking man.” Tommy dragged himself out of bed despite his disappointment. Visitors were rare. 

When all of the children had been woken up and filed into the common room in various states of disarray, they were met with the sight of a tall, angular man. Like Tubbo had said, he did look important. He wore a lab coat  _ — _ maybe a tailored one with the way that it fit his slight frame. 

“Good morning,” he drawled.

“Good morning!” the children piped in unison. They’d had it drilled into them by years of morning roll-call.

“Sit down,” he said, and they noticed the row of folding chairs in the room, exactly enough for all of them. 

“You may call me The Doctor,” he said when they were all settled and their chatter had fallen to a respectful hush. Tommy nearly laughed.

“What kind of a name is that?” he whispered to Tubbo before one of the caretakers levelled him with a severe glare and he was quiet. 

“I am here to congratulate you on behalf of the Agency, for completing the first portion of our program. For becoming accomplished flyers and academics.” Tommy glanced over at Tubbo who still asked for help spelling nearly everything  _ — _ not that he minded  _ — _ and smirked. 

“Your age group has developed fully and has started to approach the ten-year mark. When you reach your tenth birthday, you will leave the nursery and enter the second phase of the Agency program.”

“And what _ — _ ” said a girl, wiggling in her seat with her hand up, too impatient to be called on, “ _ — _ is the second phase?”

“You will find out when you start it,” he answered, before turning to one of the caretakers and saying, “That’s all, thank you.”

He was walking towards the door to leave when an expression Tommy couldn’t quite describe crossed his face. “Best remember that you’re all grown up now,” he said, turning to face them once again. “No longer children.” There was something about the man’s tone that Tommy found unsettling but he let himself be drawn into the excited conversation of what the second phase would concern over their breakfast.

Three days later, the first boy of their group turned ten and nurses led him out of the door and into the hallway that they’d only ever came through once. The snap of the clean, white door echoed through the commons.

“When will we see him again?” one of the boy’s friends asked. 

“You won’t,” a caretaker answered quietly. The children snapped to attention silently, turning their heads to watch the exchange. Tommy scooted closer to Tubbo on the bench, thinking that their own birthdays couldn’t be that far away, though they didn’t celebrate so he couldn’t be sure. 

“The second phase means leaving the nursery forever,” she continued. Tommy let out a long breath, thinking about leaving behind the only home that he could really remember, leaving behind Tubbo. 

“We’ll figure something out,” Tubbo whispered to him, seeing the way that his wings bristled in anxiety. “We’re best friends, a birthday won’t change that.”

The only solution that they came up with in their late-night strategy sessions was to find a way to communicate, though if the second phase was as technology-void as the nursery, they wouldn’t be able to do it. 

“My mom used to use this thing called E-Mail to talk to people all the time,” Tubbo said. “So whoever goes first can make one and the next person will message them when they get one too.” It wasn’t much, but it would have to work. 

They made up names and chanted them until they came to mind without effort.

“Our birthdays might be months apart,” Tommy said to Tubbo one night.

“I know,” Tubbo replied. “But it’s all I’ve got.”

When the nurses came for Tommy he hugged Tubbo in what felt like a goodbye, though he promised it wasn’t. He was tempted to crow about being older but it felt like a loss rather than a victory.

“Don’t forget about me or anything,” he whispered.

“Never,” Tubbo replied. 

And then they were walking out into the white plastic hall and the door was slamming shut behind him. Tommy, armed only with the name he would use for his E-Mail, carried himself with as much confidence as he could.

At least, he walked confidently until he saw the exam table with straps on it. Then his wings drooped. 

“Climb up,” one of the nurses said. He eyed the bench nervously before using his wings to push up slightly and settle on the crackly exam paper.

“Now be a dear and give us your hands,” another said. Did he have a choice? Not really. He held out his arms and felt them pulled to the table by the straps, his wings pressed uncomfortably to his back.

He did his best to keep his breathing even, fighting against the instinct to rip off the leather bindings and fly away  _ — _ not that he would have been strong enough to do it. 

“Don’t worry,” he heard a male voice say. It sounded like The Doctor, but the restraints prevented him from turning his head to be sure. “This is just routine _ — _ won’t hurt a bit.”

Tommy didn’t know whose routine it was but it certainly wasn’t his. He was preparing himself to try and twist his way off the table when he felt the tip of the IV tap against the inside of his arm, restrained by the strap. He couldn’t move as it slid into his arm, the process fast with a stinging feeling left by the puncture.

“You’ve done this before, Tommy. Calm down,” the man said. “And go to sleep.”

As much as he wanted to ignore the man’s orders, he felt a warmth spreading up from his arm and into his body, a tired sluggishness that pervaded his thoughts. It felt as though he was about to sink into the bench and keep going through it. 

He noticed his breathing slowing and he let it stop completely. He was so calm, so in control. 

And then the warmth from his arm went into his throat where he might have been struggling for breath if he cared and spread down into his chest. It grew into a searing flame just like the last time, the pain the same. The heat was all his sluggish mind could think about.

Then there was the pop. The moment of complete tranquility where he wished he could make a home, the fuzzy peacefulness of nothing. 

When he opened his eyes, he sat straight up, gasping for air that his reborn body already had. Instead, he inhaled a mouthful of ash and nearly choked coughing it out.

Oh god. 

That was his ash. That was him. 

He leaned over the edge of the table and vomited. 

They unstrapped him and he let himself be led out of the room wordlessly. The Doctor, writing on a clipboard by the door, gave him a short nod and a crooked smile. 

He was left in a room with a shower, handed soap and a towel. For a couple minutes, he stared at his hands numbly. Then he turned the showerhead on to max heat and stepped under it, rubbing the ash from his hair and skin until they were pink. 

He had stopped breathing. He had been dead. This wasn’t the same body that Tubbo had wrestled with, that his parents had held the hands of. This was something new. And he hated it. 

He didn’t get out of the shower until a nurse knocked on the door and told him to. Even then, his movements were reluctant and sluggish. 

He spent what could have been hours or days in a small room, dreaming of his childhood death when asleep and trying to keep thoughts of the second out of his head when awake. 

And then the nurses were back, leading him into the room with the examination room again. This time, he struggled. He beat his wings and scrabbled and tried to claw the arms that wouldn’t let him go. But the nurses were men this time — unrelenting with huge wings, maybe eagles. He nearly flipped himself off the table before they got one arm strapped in and then another. 

He was trapped and lay in silent defeat until the door swung open. 

This time, The Doctor stood in Tommy’s line of sight.

“How are you?” he asked. 

Tommy just glared at him. 

“Oh don’t give me that,” he said after Tommy refused to speak. “You were  _ made _ for this.”

“I thought that the Agency was supposed to help phoenixes,” he choked out. “This is not helping.”

“The Agency is here to help,” the man said, cocking his head. “To help everyone. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone could live like you did, be as lucky as you?”

“If this is luck, I don’t want it,” Tommy muttered. 

“Ungrateful,” the man spat back. “People would kill to have what you do.”

“Like you’re about to do?” Tommy asked. The Doctor didn’t answer; instead he cocked a gun. 

“This is another baseline test,” he said. “But you’re not getting any nice drugs this time. You’re going to have to feel it, every second of it.”

Tommy couldn’t find the words to respond so he only stared at the man in a solemn show of composure. 

Then there was a click of safety being removed and a pop that even a muffler couldn’t conceal completely. And another. And another.

He stared at the shots into his knees and stomach, shock stealing away the pain for just a second. Then it rushed in like a horrible wave and he started to scream. Blood sprayed out of his mouth and he choked on it, hoping that he might suffocate. 

His throat cleared and though the pain threatened to swallow him up, he stayed conscious. His stomach screamed. His knees screamed. It was the kind of pain that a ten year old shouldn’t have had to try and describe. And there was no warmth, not yet. That was only for when he died. 

“Please,” he pleaded. “Please.” He wanted the man to shoot once more, into his head. He wanted the peace of the flame. The man stood and took notes, ignoring him. He watched as the pool of blood from his stomach spread over the white floor.

His knees were white-hot, the sensation agonizing. He thought that maybe he could adjust them and they would hurt less but the only feedback he got when he tried to shift them to the side was more pain. 

It hurt. It hurt so bad that he wondered how he wasn’t dead already. A voice in the back of his head told him that he hadn’t lost enough blood.

He wanted to burn. He wanted to be ashes. He wanted it all to go away. 

He raised shaking hands and pushed his chest and stomach, forcing his heart to pump more blood out of the wound as the man watched with faint interest. And it might have caused excruciating pain, pain that he couldn’t help but scream because of. But it also made his fingers numb and his head fuzzy and he knew he was close. So he kept pushing, kept making keening noises that he couldn’t seem to stop.

That was when the familiar heat started in his head and he sighed in relief. For the first time, he watched with open eyes as flames lit along his stomach and knees before spreading down to his feet and up to his face. 

And it did hurt, but he’d accepted that it meant escape. So he didn’t mind the burning like he had before; being shot was much worse. 

The moment of peace didn’t last nearly long enough before he woke up, though it was as euphoric as always. 

Then he was lying in a sludge of his own ashes and blood, watching as the nurses unhooked the bindings from his arms. 

Watching as The Doctor observed him like some lab rat who was lost in a maze that had no exit.

Watching as the men nearly slipped in his blood when they lifted him from the table and set his feet on the ground. 

The white hallway was painted by three sets of pomegranate-red footsteps, two pairs of heavy boots, and one dragging pair of bare feet.

They left him in the same shower-room as before and he stared at his blood washing down the drain, despondent. He owned a different body now, a body that only knew the touch of being restrained, though his mind remembered the kiss of gunshots

It seemed like hours before they came to retrieve him, his skin long-clean and his fingers pruned. He couldn’t get himself to move out from under the stream of water until they threatened to come in and dress him themselves. Even then, he found it hard to care.

Then there were days  _ — _ hours? weeks?  _ — _ in the white room where he tried to sleep, tried not to think about the program he was in and its apparent search for immortality. He tried not to think of anything at all, make his mind completely blank, a fun little game. 

He was pretty good at it by the time the nurses came back for him. 

“Which did you like more?” The Doctor asked. 

“What?” Tommy asked. 

“Which death did you like more?” he repeated, enunciating his words as if Tommy didn’t speak the same language.

Tommy could have argued and said that dying was dying, but there was an obvious answer.

“The first one,” he said, flatly. 

“Good,” said the man across from him. “Remember that. From now on you get the choice.”

The choice in how one died was hardly a choice at all. It was like decorating the gallows in the perpetrators favorite colors; death was death. But, he reminded himself, some deaths hurt less than others. And the rush of peace before he was brought back to life, that was something else entirely. 

“Here’s how things work. You get to go to the outside world with a tracking and transmitting device on you. We’re always listening and if you say anything about what happens to you here, we bring you back in and do the second death a hundred times.” Tommy shuddered. 

“Or,” The Doctor said, “You become a model subject and keep this our little secret. You’ll have to come in for tests occasionally but it’ll never be anything worse than the first death, just like falling asleep.”

Tommy tasted ash.

“Do you understand?”

He nodded.

“Where will I live?” he asked quietly.  _ Anywhere but here _ , he thought. 

“We use the foster system,” the man answered. Tommy wondered how many connections the Agency had with the government. Too many, probably. 

“Isn’t it dangerous for phoenixes?” Tommy asked, repeating what the caretakers had told him hundreds of times. 

“We’ll always be listening. If you’re risking the program, we’ll pull you out. Otherwise, you’re on your own.”

“Tommy sighed. “Okay,” he said. 

Outside meant technology and seeing Tubbo again. 

In his head, he chanted the name that would turn into his E-Mail, the name that Tubbo would find him with. 

He hoped that Tubbo wouldn’t turn ten for a long time, though he could have already. He hoped that his best friend was quick to pass out and quick to die — an awful thing to have to hope for. He hoped for a lot of things. One thing that he’d stopped hoping for was his parents.

He’d realized, alone in that white room, that his parents were never going to come through the door. 

The child that they’d known was gone anyway. 

For a couple days, he thought that the first foster home they put him into might work. Sure, it was loud, but it drowned out his doubts and reminded him of the nursery playroom. 

The best thing about it was going out to fly, late at night. Spiraling in the stars with no one to force him down. 

When the kids got home from school, there was a desperate rush into the kitchen to grab any food that the caretaker of the house  _ — _ who was rarely seen  _ — _ left on the counter. Tommy had always been fast and usually managed to grab something, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the toddlers in the home who were too short to reach the counter, whose scrabbling hands never closed on any food. 

So even when he ran out of the kitchen with a package of chips or a bag of peanuts, he usually went to bed hungry after putting it in someone else's hands. 

It was a miserable existence but it was fine, right? If he died, he died and came back. If he died, he probably wouldn’t be so hungry. 

He went to school and tried to focus on learning but could only think about his growling stomach. 

He went to the library late at night and could only think about the fact that there were no messages from Tubbo, no sign of him anywhere. 

He went to bed and tried to ignore the itching sensation of the tracker around his ankle, tried to keep his mind completely blank. The shuffling of the children around him was comforting, though he was careful to always sleep with his wings completely covered lest a spark slip out. 

It didn’t work. 

He woke up to a crowd of children around his bed, the largest teenagers holding down his wings. 

“What are you doing?” he yelled. 

“Help me understand,” the older boy said. “You’re a phoenix, I saw the sparks myself. But you’re here eating our food when you don’t actually need it, just to steal it from us aren’t you?”

“No,” he said, wishing that they would let go of his wings. “I get hungry too.”

“Liar!” one of the boys yelled. 

“Thief!” a toddler said with a pointed finger. They were so quick to turn against him. Had they forgotten that most of the time he ended up going hungry anyway?

His head hit the mattress with the impact of a fist hitting his nose and it wasn’t quite like a gunshot but the spurt of blood and spike of pain were oddly familiar. 

He curled into a ball to try and avoid their fists, muffling his cries of pain in his wings. Even as they stomped on him and pinned him down, he knew that it wouldn’t kill him. It would just hurt with no reprieve. 

The door of the room swung open and the caretaker stuck her head in. Tommy hoped fervently that she would tell them off, help him. 

“Be quiet,” she said instead. “I’m trying to sleep.” And then the door was shut again and a younger girl stuck a blanket under the crack. 

“Did you hear that?” said the ringleader. “Be quiet, she said.” For each scream he let out, they hit him harder.

At some point, he must have passed out because he woke up with a pounding headache, unable to move his wings.

“Please,” he curled in on himself and whispered into the transmitter. “Come get me.” A clinical death didn’t seem so bad when he thought about how the flames would lift away the bruises and the pain. A clinical death seemed only natural compared to the cruelness of children. 

Fifteen minutes later, his few belongings were thrown into a trash bag and a van door was opened for him with a beckoning hand. 

An hour later, he was on the exam table, his breathing slowing, his chest burning.

And a minute after that, he was waking up in ashes with a new appreciation for being reborn because the bruises were gone and he could move his wings without pain again. He smiled. He was built to die. 

The second home was on a farm. They were forced to work whenever they were home, but the burning in his arms was a nice distraction. 

His grades slipped because even though he tried to sleep bundled up at night, he was too paranoid that someone would see his wings. So he fell asleep in class instead, struggling to stay awake during most of his lessons.

There was no message from Tubbo but the only class he tried hard in was English so that he could help his friend. His friend who would send him a message any day now. 

It was a month before someone saw a spark fly out of his wings while they were working the field in the dark, not allowed to get food until the chore was done.

The children around him watched it float up into the sky with a crazed look in their eyes before one whispered, “Ma’am doesn’t like phoenixes, you know.”

Tommy knew. He’d heard the caretaker’s rants about how they didn’t deserve what they had, how they were selfish and awful things — things, not people, she insisted. What she would do if she got her hands on a phoenix. Her words stung.

An older boy set his shovel down on the ground, an awful grin spreading across his face. “I don’t know about you guys,” he said to the crowd of farmer-children, “But I have some homework to do, movies to watch.”

He turned to Tommy. 

“Finish this by morning or we tell the caretaker all about what you are,” he said, gesturing to Tommy’s agitated wings cruelly. One by one, the children set down their shovels and marched back to the house in high spirits. Tommy stared at what still had to be done, the sunrise hours away. 

He was stupidly stubborn. He finished the field just before the sun rose, barely making it on time for the school bus, muddy and exhausted.

But their requests didn’t end; there was always a stable to clean, a chore to finish for someone. Tommy never slept anymore and the other children had an easy way to avoid the chores that no one wanted. 

And he did them. He did them with blurry eyes and an aching body until one day he couldn’t do them anymore and collapsed into the mud, facedown.

“Come get me,” he whispered. 

The van was there before he knew it, nurses lifting him in. He was leaving muddy footprints to the exam table and he was dying. But he didn’t mind dying. The exam room felt like a little home, a place to return to when he was tired. 

He never felt peace like he did in that moment of what he knew was death. 

When he opened his eyes, the fatigue and the hunger that had plagued his body were gone. 

“Thanks,” he muttered to The Doctor as he hopped off the table and went to find the shower room on his own, the nurses watching but not leading him. The water was a luxury that the farmhouse hadn’t allowed the children to use and he savored it. 

He loved the heat. 

No matter how hard he tried at the next few houses, someone always found out that he was a phoenix and someone always hated him — starved him, beat him, punished him — for it.

When he gave up, they brought him back to the white building where he died, though it didn’t feel much like a punishment anymore. Almost a reward. 

He started trying to get them to kick him out for other reasons — for fights at school or theft or vandalism — before they discovered what he was. There was a difference between being punched by a caretaker because they opened the door to him and the police versus being punched because of something he had no control of. 

His record was two days; turned out that flying out of a shopping mall with a flatscreen TV and dropping it in the parking lot made even the nicest foster parents mad. 

He didn’t hear from Tubbo for nearly a year. The day that an email showed up in his inbox, he fell backwards in the library chair in surprise and was greeted with glares from everyone in it. He didn’t mind.  _ Tubbo! Tubbo was okay! _

_ hlelo _ , it read.  _ what sity are you in? _

The lack of emotion was a little concerning — at least the diction was in-character — but Tommy remembered what the gunshots had been like, the numbness that followed. 

_ hello tubbo!  _ he typed, followed by  _ brighton. _

It turned out that Tubbo was in the same town, their reunitation a tearful one. Tommy flew to the hill they’d chosen as fast as he could and didn’t even slow down when he saw Tubbo, instead swooping down and hugging him tightly in what turned into a tumble onto the soft grass. 

“Tubbo!” he yelled. “You’re here!”

“I’m here,” the other boy said, smiling. He seemed tired, but Tommy was with him again. And that was enough 

“Are you okay?” Tommy asked quietly, seeing the shadows under the other boy’s eyes. 

“Fireworks, Toms,” he said, voice cracking. “They shot me through with fireworks and I felt every second of it.” 

“I’m so sorry,” he said, holding Tubbo as he cried. “I’m sorry.” There was nothing else he could say. He was sorry that there was nothing that he could do, that this world had trapped them in an endless cycle of life and death. 

They sat, curled around each other, in silence for a long time as the sun set on the city. 

“I have to go,” he said, checking his watch and seeing that it was almost past the strict curfew the children’s home he was in now. “But we can keep doing this, right? Meeting up?”

“Of course,” Tubbo said. Nothing had changed between them. 

He got an email a couple of days later. 

_ famly found out abou t being a phoenix _

“Shit,” he said. 

_ are you okay?  _ he typed. Thoughts of a bruised, unconscious Tubbo flashed through his head. 

_ they r really nice,  _ Tubbo answered.  _ not mad! _

And in a second email:  _ they treat me lik a son (: said i can stay for as long as i want! _

If Tommy had been the jealous type, he might have cursed the universe for the cards he’d been dealt: bad homes and angry caretakers one after another, never a moment of peace when Tubbo found a family on his first try. 

He wasn’t jealous though, not even close. 

_ Tubbo was safe _ , he thought. And that meant that Tommy didn’t have anything to worry about. On the bad nights, he repeated it in his head like a mantra:  _ Tubbo is safe, Tubbo is safe, Tubbo is safe.  _

Knowing that his best friend was happy when he was tired or hurt or going to what was probably his 20th home made everything alright. 

Life went on like that for years; Tommy an erratic pinball in the foster system and Tubbo a constant. His foster family really was nice and on the days that Tommy was reborn without injuries, clean from the Agency’s shower, he accepted Tubbo’s invites to dinner. 

He pretended, for a couple of hours, that he had a family, a home. 

Then he went back to stealing and fighting and smoking — that one was new — until the homes kicked him out and the Agency covered for his history and he was placed somewhere else. An endless cycle. 

Some days it felt unescapable. Maybe because it was. 

This was when Tommy developed a habit, a habit that he knew was bad but couldn’t seem to stop.

It went like this: 

He got so used to the feeling of dying that he missed it when he was alive. 

Not the pain of bleeding out or a slow death, of course. An instant one where he didn’t notice the dying part and the flames came immediately. 

Because nothing in the world could replicate the euphoria that he felt when he was dead, completely dead for just a moment before he woke up in ash.

It got to the point where he missed the exam table, wanted to be there all of the time, but there were only so many homes he could get kicked out of to return to it. He came up with something else. 

Late at night, he would sneak out of whatever home they’d put him in and fly higher and higher into the clouds, flapping his wings until he knew that he was out of the city and over the fields instead. He would circle upwards until the oxygen was so thin that his head hurt. 

And then he would pull his wings to his body and plunge. The air would push him into a dive and he would let it happen, never trying to slow the fall. Watching the grass rush up to meet him. 

He would hit the ground — though he never really remembered that part — and burst into flames instantly, his head filling with the heat followed by the tranquil pause of death. It was an addictive pastime. 

More and more mornings, he found himself lying in the middle of the countryside at sunrise, pulling his clothes on and brushing away the ash so that he could make it home on time. Not that anyone noticed or cared if he was late. Sometimes, his wings felt exhausted on the flight home but he ignored that, told himself he was just flying too much these days. The rest of his body never felt better than on those mornings.

The tracker that was impossible to take off was also impossible to reattach to his new body, so he tended to just stick it in his pocket and go. 

“I noticed that you’ve picked up on a little hobby,” The Doctor said the next time Tommy woke up in the exam room. 

“Hmm?” Tommy said, cocking his head in a pantomime of confusion. 

“Don’t play stupid. We can tell when the tracker detaches because the feed cuts out until you pick it up again.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well I’m not doing that on purpose, just make it easier to put back on if it upsets you.”

“You’re a strange one, aren’t you?” the man said in what Tommy didn’t think was a question at all. “You’re the only one that acknowledges your potential, the only one who’s not scared of dying.” His voice was slimy and Tommy hated it. 

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m not.”

The tracker that a nurse handed him when he got out of the shower had a strap like a belt buckle. It should have made him feel more free; instead, it was like he’d been given a shinier cage. 

Still, he nodded in gratitude as he left the Agency and got into the van, headed to whatever home was next.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed the chapter even though it was pretty angsty. I promise that there'll be some comfort in the next one -- and the sleepy bois!!
> 
> come yell at me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/ghostbandaids), i just made an acc and will be a devoted moot 4 literally anyone
> 
> If you have the time, I'd love to hear feedback! It really makes my day!!
> 
> ✿cʕ•́ ᴥ •̀cʔ


	2. Burning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tommy goes to a new foster home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> slightly less angsty, woohoo
> 
> CW: continued warnings from last chapter, transphobic characters in one paragraph (tommy punches them, don't worry)

His life was a swirl of plunges to the earth, failing classes, and fights — winning more than he lost but losing plenty. His nose was a cycle of crooked and straight depending on whether he’d gotten it broken or been reborn more recently. 

He didn’t live for much; maybe to see Tubbo smile and hear him laugh. Other than that, he lived for the peace of death — a joke if he’d ever heard one. 

“Be honest,” Tubbo said one afternoon on the hill, hand on Tommy’s shoulder. “Tell me that you’re not okay. I know you’re not.” 

He wanted nothing more than to tell the truth. Lately, his wings had started to look strangely dull, sparking less frequently. There was never anyone to take care of him. 

“I’m fine,” he said instead. It wasn’t a complete lie; with Tubbo safe in front of him, he would be alright. And keeping Tubbo happy meant keeping most of his life a secret.

“I’m fine,” he repeated to himself when he sat up in a field the next morning and refastened the tracker, ash sloughing off him. 

Tommy was a good liar. Even to himself, he lied. 

He was fifteen and back in the white Agency van. 

“I don’t know how you’ve done it,” one of the nurses said, sighing, “But the boss says you’ve exhausted all of the foster homes the Agency has connections with.”

He smiled, a small weak thing. It was a victory of sorts. Maybe now they would let him go. 

“We’ve found someone to take you in though,” she said instead. “He adopted two boys before he stopped fostering so this might be good!” They both knew Tommy wouldn’t last long anywhere. 

“He seems like a nice man,” the other said. “You’re very lucky.”

“Sure,” said Tommy. “Lucky.” His voice was flat. The gravel road jolted his wings against the seat uncomfortably but he made no effort to adjust them. 

They pulled into the driveway. 

“Got your stuff?” a nurse asked. 

“Yeah,” he answered. The truth was that he didn’t collect belongings anymore. If other children didn’t manage to steal them, they would disappear in transit from the Agency. 

His goal was to move through houses fast enough that he never stayed more than a few nights anyway; sentimentality might slow him down. 

He watched as they drove away before stalking up the driveway, wings bristled in anticipation. 

The door swung open before he reached it and he was met with the sight of a man, shorter than him. Good. Less of a threat. 

He had blonde hair and an open, kind face. The strangest thing about him was his wings, spreading out behind him with a span that seemed unusually wide, pitch black.

“Hello!” the man said cheerfully. “Usually they have someone come with you for introductions, a caseworker?” Tommy just shrugged. 

“Hmm,” the man hummed before shaking his head slightly and sticking out his hand. “I’m Phil.”

Tommy watched cautiously but the man didn’t make a move to hit him with it, just held it in the air — he wasn’t being paranoid, it was just that some caretakers transformed the minute the van pulled away from the house. 

Phil dropped his hand when he saw that Tommy wasn’t planning to shake it. 

“And you are?” he asked. 

“Tommy,” Tommy muttered, hands in his pockets. 

“It’s very nice to meet you, Tommy,” Phil said. Tommy didn’t reply. The man seemed soft; one good fight would probably be enough to get Tommy kicked out. He didn’t start school for a couple of days though so he was trapped until then. 

“Oh!” Phil exclaimed, filling the awkward silence. “Did you forget your stuff in the car? You didn’t bring anything.”

“No,” Tommy said. 

“You didn’t forget it?”

“No.”

“So where is it?”

“There wasn’t anything to forget.”

“Oh,” Phil said softly. He sounded sad, though Tommy wasn’t sure how he’d already upset the man. “We’ll go shopping later. Come on in!”

Tommy waited until the man walked through the door to follow him. The house seemed unusually quiet and then he remembered that it wasn’t a group home, that he was going to be living with a family of sorts. 

_ Like Tubbo! _ , his brain chirped before he crushed the thought. Tubbo had gotten lucky and Tommy lived in a world of black cats and broken mirrors. 

“We turned the guest room into yours when I got the call,” Phil while walking past a cozy-looking living room. “It’s empty, sorry about that. Like I said, we’ll have to go shopping later.”

The idea of his own room was foreign. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t slept in a dorm with other kids. But something bad would happen soon, he told himself. It wasn’t good to hope when any minute now, Phil would hit him or yell at him or put him to work. 

“Bathroom’s across the hall,” Phil continued, interrupting his thoughts. “There’s a lock on the door but I do have a key — promise I won’t use it unless I think it’s an emergency. The boys don’t have one.”

His bedroom was white and clean, a huge bed against one wall and a desk in the other. In a way, it looked like an Agency room. Tommy found that strangely comforting. 

“I’ll bring dinner up and you can have it in here tonight, alright?” Phil said softly as walked back into the hallway. “Figured you might want to wait a couple of days before we have one together.” 

“Oh, and I have two sons but your caseworker probably told you about that already.”

He shook his head side to side. 

“They didn’t? Well Techno is 17 and Wilbur 16, I adopted them both years ago after they’d been in the foster system for a while. They’re pretty much opposites.” He smiled. “You’ll see what I mean. And if you ever need someone to talk to, they’re both great kids.”

Fat chance of that. The children of foster parents were awful and territorial; parents always played favorites. It didn’t matter who started the fight or who really took more food when there was a foster kid to blame. 

At least he had his own room — and a lock! He’d never had one of those before.

“We don’t have many rules around here,” Phil continued. “Obviously, I expect you to have respect for everyone that lives here, but they’re expected to be respectful to you as well. Just because you’re new doesn’t mean you deserve any less. If there’s anything going on, I’d like you to come talk to me about it, okay?”

Tommy nodded.

“Are there any boundaries or rules that you’d like to set for me?” Phil asked. No one had ever asked Tommy that question — his life had been made up of orders and choices made for him. He shook his head no, not trusting that he would be listened to anyway. Best not to get his hopes up. 

Phil was too nice, too honest. He reminded himself that everything was temporary. 

He was curled up on top of the bed when he heard a quiet knock and Phil’s voice on the other side of the door.

“Hope you like spaghetti!” Tommy pushed his face into one of the pillows but his stomach growled anyway. 

“Maybe you’re asleep,” Phil continued. “I’m leaving it right outside, okay?” The way he said it, it was like he knew Tommy was listening. The boy waited until Phil’s footsteps retreated down the hall to open the door a crack and pull the plate of pasta through it. 

It was the best food he’d ever tasted. 

_ Temporary _ , he thought.  _ Temporary, temporary, temporary.  _

It didn’t stop his fickle brain from hoping that there would be more meals like this. 

He’d planned to go flying that night but his body was still recovering from the Agency, his stomach comfortably full. He fell asleep on top of the bed, reveling in the fact that he didn’t have to hide his sparking wings from anyone. 

When he woke up, the house was quiet and dark and he needed to go to the bathroom. He stood at the door and listened for several minutes but heard nothing. Still, he felt on edge as he crept through the hall; foster homes were always worse in the dark. 

He used it and washed his hands quietly in the sink before glancing out into the hall and reaching for the light switch. That was when he saw the photos. 

His head had been down when Phil led him through earlier so he hadn’t noticed, but the light from the bathroom illuminated them. Family photos, whole rows of them. Phil and two boys, smiling and laughing, swimming in the ocean. The older boy’s hair turning pink and the younger one making bunny ears. School concerts and holidays. There were so many. 

Tommy didn’t think there was a single picture of him. Not in any of the homes he’d ever stayed in, that was for sure. He wondered if his parents had kept any photos. 

He sniffed, letting out a shuddering breath. The hallway looked blurry.

That was when he heard another door in the hall open. 

“Wil?” a low voice asked as what Tommy knew was one of the sons walked towards the bathroom, face obscured in shadows. There was nowhere for him to hide.

His wings flew up behind him in a defensive whoosh as the man came around the corner and Tommy was faced with the sight of him; he was huge, the only thing not terrifying about him his neon pink hair. A scar extended down the side of his face and his glasses looked barely held together by a strip of tape. 

A fighter then. 

Tommy felt a shiver of fear that started in his head but stood his ground. He couldn’t show weakness now. He was not scared of anything. 

“Whoa,” the man said, moving his hands out in what might have been intended as a placating gesture, though it made Tommy flinch. 

“Sorry,” the man muttered. “Didn’t know anyone else was still awake.” This was the part where Tommy expected to be hit or at least belittled. Instead, the man started to back away from Tommy’s angry figure with small steps.

“Just gonna go back to bed, alright? I’m Techno, by the way.” Then he was turning and walking back to his room, pink braid and sleep-mussed wings swinging behind him — unlike his neon hair, they were a deep, chestnut brown. Tommy let out a long breath of air that he’d been holding in when he heard the door click shut quietly. 

The people in this house were too unpredictable, he thought. And very strange. 

He made it back to his room and collapsed onto his bed, falling asleep only after his heart stopped pounding and the adrenaline cleared from his mind. 

When he woke up, it was to Phil’s knock on the door and a cheery ‘good morning’. 

“I made some pancakes for breakfast!” He heard the clink of a plate set against the wood floor. “If you need anything, I work from home so my office is on the second floor. Feel free to hang out in the living room if you want — there’s a TV and some books in there.”

After the footsteps receded, Tommy ate the pancakes in huge bites, not bothering with a fork. They were delicious. Chocolate chip. Not that he’d eaten enough pancakes to form an opinion but if he had, these would have ended up high on his list of favorites.

He was wary of leaving the bedroom, but he was also very, very bored. So he listened for footsteps before padding into the living room and grabbing the TV remote, sitting on the couch with his back to the wall and his face to the door. 

He hadn’t really watched TV since the nursery. Back then, the biggest reward was getting the childrens’ channel turned on in the commons room, something that was only for special occasions. In the foster homes that followed, the TV was always in the room of the foster parents if there was one at all. And in the libraries, he only had the time to email Tubbo.

In a moment of nostalgia, he scrolled through the channels until he found the one for kids. It was calming with its bright colors and simple plotlines and language. He didn’t realize how engrossed he was until he heard the crunch of a car pulling into the gravel driveway. 

Pushing himself off the couch with his wings, he quickly darted back to his room, closing and locking the door just as he heard Phil’s sons enter. He’d forgotten to turn the TV off. 

“Who put the kid shit on?” one of them — Techno, he thought — grumbled jokingly.

“Try to tarnish Clifford’s name and I swear to god you’ll face these hands,” said the other.

“Really, Wilbur?” Techno said. The words were followed by an exaggerated “Heh?” and the sound of a pillow being swung into someone. A thump. 

“Vanquished by my own brother! The horror!” Wilbur yelled.

“We should have never signed you up for acting classes,” Techno muttered.

“Tech!” shouted Phil who had apparently been eavesdropping as well. “I think you need a better excuse for manslaughter than ‘I dislike children’s cartoons and my brother doesn’t’”

“I think it’s as good as any!” Techno yelled back. 

Phil laughed and Tommy heard his footsteps coming down the stairs.

“Oi! Family dinner tonight?” he asked.

“I have essays to write so I will only be attending if you make mac-n-cheese,” Wilbur said dramatically. Most of his sentences were delivered with the flair of an actor, actually. It was in stark contrast to Techno’s monotone voice. 

“Don’t tell me you prefer pasta to my company,” Phil said.

“Oh I wouldn’t say that,” Wilbur replied. “Just imply it!”

“I’m going to ignore that insult because I was planning on making it for you already.”

Tommy sat on the bed, cross-legged, listening to the lull of their banter and the sound of cooking. When Phil told him that dinner was ready and asked him to come out, he unlocked the door and dragged his feet while he walked to the dining room. What else was he supposed to do — refuse?

Techno gave him a nod. 

“Hi! I’m Wilbur,” the wannabe-playwright said. “It’s nice to meet you.” Tommy hoped that giving a nod like Techno’s wouldn’t be too rude — not that he was worried about being rude, right? He tried not to stare at the spots on Wilbur’s wings where feathers didn’t seem to grow, raised lines of scars barely covered by down. 

He sat down in a seat and curled his arms around himself as Phil carried the dish of noodles to the table and Wilbur declared war on its contents. He could tell that they were watching him in the way that their eyes were constantly flicking over to him and then back to their food, but they didn’t force him to talk. 

When Techno handed him the serving spoon, he froze, studying their plates to see how much they’d taken. Too much could get him in trouble but too little might be insulting and he didn’t know if Phil was the type to lash out when offended. 

“Take as much as you want,” Phil said softly. So he settled for taking the same amount as Phil; practically a small mountain anyway. He resisted the urge to shovel the entire thing into his mouth, instead taking small, civil bites while he listened to the conversation. 

“So then this kid named Clay — absolute bastard by the way, don’t know why he hates me so much,” Techno said. “—said that he wanted to fight me.”

“Oh sure,” interrupted Wilbur. “You have no idea why he hates you because you only called him an ‘complete asshole’ to his face once when he beat you on that math test.” Tommy’s head snapped up at their language, waiting to see Phil’s reaction. Surprisingly, the man didn’t yell at them like his caretakers in the past would have, too busy listening to the exchange with an intrigued look on his face.

“It was only one time! And Phil always says that it’s good to express emotions when you’re feeling them!” Techno said defensively, laughing. “Anyways, I told him that we would meet in the parking lot when school got out but then I found Wilbur and we just left through the back. He probably waited for a while before he realized I wasn’t going to show.”

“Techno!” Phil yelled. “You think that’s going to resolve the issue?” They dissolved into laughter.

Even after eating all of what he’d taken, Tommy was still hungry. He wasn’t about to ask for seconds but he found himself staring at the dish wistfully. 

“Anyone want more?” Phil asked when they were all finished. They shook their heads. “Leftovers in the fridge are for anyone, by the way,” he said to Tommy.

“It’s Techno’s turn for dishes!” Wilbur yelled as he ran out of the room. “I’ve got essays and shit.”

“He’s not the only student here,” Techno grumbled, walking over to the collection of plates in the sink. Tommy set his own on the counter next to it, avoiding eye contact.

“Goodnight, Tommy,” Phil said as he attempted to slink out of the room unnoticed.

“Goodnight.”

His stomach woke him up with an insistent growling. It was probably a bad idea to go downstairs and get more food, but he thought that he could do it without getting caught. And if he did get caught, maybe he would just get kicked out sooner. 

So he climbed out of bed and padded quietly to the kitchen, opening the fridge and finding the dish of pasta bathed in the cool, white light. It was just as good cold and he ate two servings ravenously. He hadn’t had access to food like this in a long time. 

He set his plate in the sink and reached up to grab a glass for some water. This was when too many things happened at once. 

“Hello?” a voice said in the dark. His hand, mid-reach, stuttered and knocked a glass out of the cabinet. He watched it fall in muted horror, unable to stop its trajectory. 

“Huh,” said Wilbur — who’d just stepped into the kitchen — as it shattered into a million pieces on the floor. “I liked that mug.”

“I’m sorry,” Tommy said, crouching to pick up the pieces, hands shaking. “Sorry,” he repeated, voice weak. This was it then. He was breathing too fast but there was nothing that he could do about it. 

Wilbur kneeled down and moved as if to put a hand on his shoulder and Tommy flinched back and curled around himself, his wings a shield. People had hurt him for accidents much smaller than this. 

“Hey,” the other boy said quietly. “I’m not mad about it or anything.”

_ He was lying _ , Tommy thought.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, stacking more shards in a neat pile. “I’ll pick it up, don’t worry.”

“Don’t touch that!” Wilbur whisper-shouted and Tommy pulled his hands away, unsure of what the other boy wanted. 

“Just wait here, I’ll go find the broom,” Wilbur continued. He didn’t sound mad.

When Wilbur came back, he was carrying a small first aid kit along with a broom and dustpan.

“What’s that for?” Tommy asked, pointing to it.

“Your hands, dumbass,” Wilbur said. Only then did he realize that the glass had cut into his fingers and he was leaving bloody marks all over the kitchen. He stared at them in fascination for a moment before tucking them behind his back.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“I’ve already seen them,” said Wilbur, raising an eyebrow.

“So?” 

“So let me help.” There was a second where Tommy bristled and stared into the other boys eyes, not wanting the help but knowing that refusing it would probably be worse. 

“Fine.” He set his wrists on the counter to stem their shaking and gritted his teeth as Wilbur looked the cuts over for glass shards before cleaning them and wrapping them in bandages. 

“Sorry,” the boy muttered when Tommy hissed out a breath while the last cut, a particularly large one, was being cleaned. 

“It’s fine,” Tommy said. “Don’t tell Phil.”

“About what?” Wilbur asked, winking. “Seriously though, I won’t. Not that he would be mad about any of it if I did.”

“Just don’t,” Tommy said tiredly. Then he yawned. 

“Go to sleep,” Wilbur said. “I’ll clean this up.” Tommy was too tired to fight over a broom and a dust pan; if Wilbur really wanted to deal with the glass, he could do it. Tommy went back to his room and collapsed into bed immediately after he’d locked the door. 

The next morning, he heard Techno yell, “Hey Wil, where’s that mug you always use? I was going to take it — definitely not to annoy you or anything — but it’s missing.”

Tommy held his breath.

“Haven’t seen it for a while,” Wilbur said, mouth full of cereal. “Maybe someone broke it and we forgot.”

“Hmm,” said Techno. “I’ll miss stealin’ it to make you mad.”

And that was that. 

Phil took him shopping for school supplies and with each notebook and t-shirt thrown into the shopping cart, he cringed with the thought that his debt to the man was growing.

“Pick something out!” Phil would say. And Tommy would shake his head. It wasn’t that he didn’t want things, it was just that he knew they wouldn’t last. So there was no point in making Phil buy them. 

He’d been at so many new schools, seen so many students stare at him with open curiosity — he hated it; only The Doctor was allowed to look at him like a lab rat. Sitting in the office while Phil did paperwork, he zoned out and let his mind go blank, only snapping back to reality when the man tapped him on the shoulder.

“Want one of the boys to give you a tour? Upperclassman schedules are completely different but they wouldn’t mind showing you around.”

“No,” he said. 

“Okay.” Phil handed him a piece of paper. “Look, they’ve made you a little map!”

He took it without comment, and Phil waited until he made eye contact to say, “You’re going to be okay, Tommy. Call me if you need anything.” He nodded in response. Sure. He would be just fine. 

He walked, a bit lost though he wouldn’t admit it, to his first class. And then his second, his third. Forced to make introductions to the students. He couldn’t think of a fun fact about himself so he said the first thing that came to mind: “My favorite foods are chocolate chip pancakes and spaghetti.”

Which was pretty much the truth.

When the bell rang and students jolted towards the door with the most animation that he’d seen all day, he assumed that it must have been lunch. He followed the stream of them down to the cafeteria, not bothering to grab the bag of food that Phil had pushed into his hands that morning. 

He was on a mission.

It didn’t take him long to find a group of boys that were too loud and far too cocky, towering over a kid trying to eat his lunch alone at one of the tables. 

“Sorry, Samantha. You’re gonna have to speak up because I can’t hear you,” one of them drawled.

“I told you that it’s Sam. My name is Sam” the boy said, his voice a shaky whisper. 

The kid leaning over the table elbowed his friend. “I couldn’t hear what she said,” he sneered. “Could you?”

“He,” the boy whispered, barely audible. “I’m a boy.”

“Wanna show us what’s under there, Samantha? Wanna prove it?” a cruel-looking kid in the group said, nodding at the boy’s oversized hoodie. Sam wrapped his arms around himself tighter and Tommy noticed that no one else in the packed room was going to do anything. 

“Hey!” he said, waving nonchalantly as he walked across the room. And then, “Shut the fuck up,” as he drove his fist into the ringleader’s nose. It felt good, the impact. It burned like a whisper of fire across his knuckles. 

He was a much better fighter than them. 

Ducking and throwing punches in the whirlwind style he’d developed, the third boy didn’t manage to knock him down until the other two had been hit so hard they’d decided to get a teacher rather than rejoin the fight. 

Then he got kicked in the stomach and it was the most familiar sensation he’d felt in a while. If Phil and his sons weren’t going to do it, it looked like he’d found a substitute. 

When a frantic teacher finally showed up to yell at them, he grinned and spat out the blood from a fist to the mouth on the floor. He didn’t look at anything but the teacher’s cardigan as he was led to the office, smiling all the way. 

“You’re telling us that you started the fight unprovoked?” the headmaster said. 

He nodded in affirmation, watching Phil in hope of anger, some reaction. 

“Now, a Ms. Samantha Parker told a different story, said that you came to her defense in the lunchroom. 

“His defense,” Tommy interrupted.

“What?”

“His name is Sam. Aren’t headmasters supposed to know this kind of stuff about their students?”

“Oh,” the headmaster said, shuffling his papers to look into a student file and wrinkling his nose. “I suppose you’re right. So then, were you defending … Sam?”

“Does it matter? I punched first.”

He was given lunch detentions for two weeks. Expecting to be yelled at for his actions, he was surprised when in the car on the way home, Phil looked faintly proud. 

“You couldn’t have resolved it by talking to them?” Phil asked. Tommy shrugged. 

“I hope there’s not a next time. If there is, try communicating first, yeah?”

He stared straight ahead until they got home and he carried his backpack up to his room. Phil hadn’t been mad at all, hadn’t shown any signs of anger. But he’d said that he didn’t want a next time so maybe Tommy would just have to get in another fight. 

The next day, the boys found him in the empty classroom while the teacher was off using the bathroom. His ribs still ached and he was less agile than before but he still managed to land some good, bruising punches before the teacher came back.

“Hey!” she yelled shrilly when she walked around the corner. “Stop it!” They had him cornered and the leader threw a last hit to his stomach before they ran from the room. He doubled over and gasped for air. 

“Are you alright?” she asked. 

“Yeah,” he wheezed, voice gravelly. “I started it.” He grinned. 

Phil looked more suspicious than angry in the office, listening as the teacher argued for Tommy’s case while all Tommy would say was that he started the fight and that it was his fault.

“Second strike. You have after school detentions starting tomorrow,” the headmaster said. 

“Did they come after you?” Phil asked in the car on the way home. “Or are you starting fights for no reason?”

Tommy didn’t answer.

They were waiting for him in the parking lot when he got out of detention the next day — they’d been absent at lunch, maybe they had detention too — and he’d hoped that they’d forgotten about him. He was turning to walk away when he saw Phil’s car, parked in the lot and waiting for him as well. Perfect. 

He stalked towards them, not even waiting for them to speak before he cuffed the leader’s ear. He was engrossed in dodging and throwing punches, avoiding being hit for the most part, when he felt a shadow on his back and saw the other boys pausing with a vague sense of fear in their eyes. 

Because it wasn’t Phil behind him; it was Techno. 

“C’mon,” he said to Tommy. “I’m bored and I have homework.” To the other boys, he simply made a shooing motion with his hands and they stumbled away from him. 

Tommy trailed him to the car without saying anything.

“Should I tell Phil?” Techno asked when Tommy was buckled in and he’d pulled out onto the street. 

“Would he be mad at me?” 

“Probably not. He doesn’t really get mad.”

“Then there’s no point,” Tommy said, sighing. He’d have to change strategies if getting kicked out of school wasn’t enough. 

“Ah. That’s what this is,” said Techno, eyes on the road. “You don’t really want to fight, do you?”

“Of course I want to fight!” Tommy said defensively. 

“I could tell that you didn’t want to fight those boys until you saw Phil’s car. Your wings gave you away.”

Tommy didn’t say anything. 

“Which means that you just want to upset Phil,” Techno continued. “I’m not really for that, I like the dude.”

Gravel under the car’s tires filled the silence while Techno waited, seeing if Tommy would respond. He didn’t.

“You think he’s too good to be true, don’t you?” Techno asked. “So you’re trying to get kicked out before he turns on you. Or at least, that was what I thought at first.” Tommy’s eyes widened. He nodded, a small thing. 

“I don’t think that he’s ever hurt someone,” Techno continued. “Seriously. And believe me when I say that fightin’ isn’t going to work because I got suspended and moved to three new schools before I realized that he just refused to get mad.”

“Did you ever try anything worse?” Tommy asked, forehead resting against the cool glass of the window. 

“Oh, yeah,” Techno laughed. “I tried everything I could think of to get him to kick me out. Took me a year to realize that he wasn’t going to become a different person and that all my efforts were useless.”

They pulled into the driveway.

“All you have to do if you want to leave is ask,” Techno said. “But there isn’t anyone as good as Phil.”

He opened the door to get out. “Oh, and your defensive stance is all wrong so you’re overcompensating with your approaches. Changing your footwork would let you move less and hit more.”

“Are you saying that you want me to keep fighting?”

“No. But if you do, you should win.”

Tommy laughed in disbelief. “You should fight me sometime,” he said.

“It wouldn’t be much of a fight.”

“Yeah!” Tommy yelled. “Because you’d lose!”

“Sure.”

After that, he did his best to avoid the bullies. It wasn’t that he wanted Phil or Techno’s approval — of course not! It was just that he wanted to take advantage of the warmth and the food of the home for a little bit. Then he would go back to trying to get kicked out. 

He liked eating lunch with Sam, who seemed to be okay with the loud and constant conversation that spewed out of his mouth. He liked sleeping with the door locked, eating real meals. Getting enough sleep that he could focus during classes. 

But he told himself that any day now, he’d have to go steal something or fight someone more important than a school boy. 

Any day. 

He told Phil that he was going to ride a bus to the library to email one of his friends and the man nodded absentmindedly, pulling money out of a drawer in the kitchen for the fare.

The next day, Phil handed him a new phone. He tried to push it back into the man’s hands.

“Honestly, Tommy. I should have gotten you one earlier. And now you can talk to your friend whenever you want.” 

He left it on counters and in Phil’s office but it kept showing back up on his bed so eventually he gave in and set it up, sending an email to Tubbo. The other boy had had a cell phone for years now.

It was nice to have regular conversations; maintaining a connection when Tommy could only occasionally slip away to the public computers had been difficult.

Every time the screen lit up with a new text complaining about an english assignment or asking what Tommy had been up to, he smiled. He tried not to think about what Phil could hold against him if he wanted to: the room, the phone, the food, a growing list of debt. 

For the first time in years, he could meet up with Tubbo wearing new clothes and clean from the shower that Phil insisted he use whenever he wanted. They didn’t do much -- usually just laid in the grass on the hall and watched the clouds.

It was more than enough for Tommy. 

After the fights, he’d only admitted to the injuries they could see — a couple of bruises on his face, a sore chin that he took an ice pack for. He’d pretended that his ribs didn’t scream with every movement and hadn't seemed to improve since he’d been kicked. He assumed that they were broken. 

He was itching to go flying, maybe heal himself up with a little burst of fire. The alternative was to tell Phil and go to the hospital — a horrible idea. Plus, it had been a while since his last death and he missed the high of it. 

Everyone in the house seemed to be notoriously nocturnal so he decided to lock his bedroom door and go out the window instead of the door, lifting off into the dark night. 

He flew out over the city lights and up into the clouds, away from the home that had been strangely nice to him and the homework he’d been ignoring. The fear that any second, things were going to change for the worse. 

Then he plunged straight down, feeling, for a second, a hint of fear.  _ That wouldn’t do _ , he thought. He couldn’t be put into a house that seemed to show a streak of humanity and become a weakling. This was what he was built for.

He pulled his wings in completely and finished the dive into the dirt, the comforting spread of fire pushing away his doubts. It would all be okay. In the flames, there was only peace. 

He opened his eyes to the fading stars and a pink-tinged sky. Pulling on his singed clothes and tracker, he rose into the air, feeling more alive than he had in a while, ignoring a twinge from one of his wings. A couple experimental breaths confirmed that his ribs had healed, and his hands were no longer criss-crossed with cuts from the glass. 

He barely made it home by sunrise. At the window next to his, Wilbur happened to be staring through the glass and watched him drift down and fly through the window. Tommy didn’t notice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading! I hope you have a great day
> 
> come yell at me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/ghostbandaids), just made an acc and i'll be a devoted moot 4ever if u follow me
> 
> if you have the time, I'd love feedback! getting comments on my fics never fails to make me smile


	3. Flying

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tommy gets caught.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> soooo the last chapter was kinda a break -- this one is pretty angsty but happy ending, pog!! thank you so much for reading! (:
> 
> CW: continued warnings from previous chapters, violence, injury (including from guns)

It was Sunday night.

“Want to watch a movie?” Techno yelled over the sound of Wilbur’s guitar playing, seemingly expecting a response from someone in the house. From Tommy?

“Depends on who’s picking it!” Tommy yelled back. 

“Me.”

“No!” 

He thought for a second that he’d overstepped before he heard Techno’s grumbly laugh as the boy knocked on the door to Wilbur’s room. 

“Hey Wil!” he yelled over the acoustic strumming. “Movie in the living room!” The music cut off abruptly. 

“Can I pick what we watch?” asked Wilbur. “Your taste in movies is shit.”

Techno let out a scream of frustration. “Fine,” he continued in a much calmer tone. “That’s fine, I’m not insulted at all.”

Tommy opened his door and followed them down the hallway. Techno turned and glared at him, and he was proud that he barely flinched backwards at the expression, though it made his heart pound. 

“What?” he said. “I heard that Wilbur was going to pick a movie for us so I had to show up.”

“You are a bitch. Wilbur is a bitch. There is only one nice person in this whole and that is Phil!” Techno yelled as they walked past the kitchen — where Phil was making tea — and into the living room. 

“Be nice,” the man said over his shoulder. “And let Wil pick the movie this time.”

“There is no respite!” Techno said, falling onto the couch face first. “Put me out of my misery.”

Tommy curled up in a chair near the door and let the lull of whatever Wilbur had put on wash over him. He had no idea how to tell a good movie from a bad one but whatever they were watching seemed alright.

He didn’t even notice that his eyes were slipping shut until he felt someone poking his shoulder and opened his eyes to darkness. For a second, he thought he was back in the nursery, another early morning where Tubbo didn’t want to let him sleep in.

“Tubbo?” he mumbled. 

“No. Wilbur,” the boy said and Tommy shot straight up, realizing that he’d fallen asleep in the same room with them, wings fully exposed. 

“Phil told us not to let you sleep in the chair all night or you’d mess up your wings, so we’re commandin’ you to get your ass to bed,” Techno said.

“Sorry,” Tommy said as he stood up — feigning nonchalance — and stretched his arms.  _ They hadn’t seen anything _ , he reassured himself.

“Thanks for waking me up.”

“No problem,” said Wilbur.

“Goodnight,” said Techno. 

He’d have to be more careful.

Uneasiness tickled down his feathers as he lay in bed that night. He’d been too close, too trusting. They had almost started to feel like friends in the weeks since he’d been dropped off.

Wilbur’s constant guitar playing drifted through the wall, making him smile without even meaning to. And Techno seemed gruff but Tommy realized that if he asked for help with homework — not that he ever needed help with homework — Techno would take it as a compliment. 

He’d heard them laugh and yell and debate but no one in the house had ever raised their voices in real anger. 

He’d almost forgotten what he was hiding from them, almost forgotten that people could be perfectly nice to a raggedy teenager but change their minds when they realized that the teenager was also a seemingly-immortal entity.

His wings itched and he couldn’t fall asleep so he stood up to pace instead. Back and forth. Back and forth, burning with a nervous energy.

The bright glow of the moon cast a light through the window that seemed to call to him. He didn’t think that there was a chance at falling asleep anyway, so he listened to it, locking the door before climbing out the window and rising slowly into the night. 

Old habits died hard. 

Inside the house, Wilbur set down his guitar and ran into the hall. 

Tommy looped lazily through the air, somersaulting and flipping, pretending that there was a crowd of people cheering for his tricks. A couple of sparks flicked out of his feathers and he mulled over the idea of running away to the circus, becoming a flamethrower with an odd resistance to fire. 

He was exhausted and for a second, he almost turned around and went back to Phil’s, almost slipped through the window and into bed like he’d never left. But gravity was already pulling him down, tempting him. 

So he pushed up into the thin air, above the clouds, staring at the moon while he pulled his wings in. It was beautiful. A smile crossed his face as he tipped backwards. 

Then he saw something covering the light, something huge and dark and moving towards him. 

“Tommy!” a voice yelled, panicked and hoarse. It sounded awfully like Phil. 

“Tommy, what the fuck are you doing?” Even over the rush of the wind, it was unmistakable. 

He tried to extend his wings but air had pushed them to his sides and he was falling too fast. Above him, Phil swooped down, gliding with his huge wings extended. 

“Lift!” he yelled from Tommy’s side. “Lift, goddamnit!” 

But there was nothing Tommy could do, and Phil wasn’t quite close enough to catch him. 

It reminded him of another plunge to the earth, another breathtaking fall. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, the wind stealing his voice away. 

And then he was crumpling into the earth and Phil, failing his last-ditch effort to reach Tommy, was skimming the grass, stumbling into a landing. 

Even though Tommy knew what must have followed, he couldn’t remember it happening. Instead he welcomed the burning and peace, his mind free from the thoughts of Phil who must have been watching it all unfold. 

“Oh, Tommy,” Phil said quietly. There was a second where he felt the man absentmindedly run fingers through his hair, a comforting feeling that he leaned into. Then he remembered what had just happened and curled his wings around himself in a rapid motion, hoping to protect himself. 

To protect himself from Phil who must have known he was a phoenix.

To protect himself from the sinking feeling in his chest that he was about to lose the first people that could have been his family. 

It was quiet and dark. The ash got into his nose and he couldn’t stop himself from sneezing.

“Bless you,” Phil said. 

Tommy unfurled and looked at the man curiously, waiting for him to show the ridicule or jealousy or aggression Tommy’d come to expect. Phil sat on the ground next to him, wings spread out behind him, a pile of ash in his lap. 

His pants were singed but he seemed unharmed — which didn’t make much sense, not that it was Tommy’s biggest concern. 

“This doesn’t change things,” Phil said, head tilted to look up at the stars.

“What?” Tommy asked, voice weak. 

“You’re the same person. I’m not going to make you leave or anything.”

“Oh.” He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it. 

Phil stood up and brushed himself off, waving to two dark blots in the sky that he’d obviously noticed long before Tommy. Wilbur stumbled into a landing, Techno barely managing to catch him and set him down in the dirt before gracefully gliding to the ground himself..

“Sorry,” Wilbur panted. “Is everything alright?” One of his wings spasmed and he winced but didn’t draw attention to it.

Phil looked at Tommy, maybe expecting him to make a statement or even see if he would. He didn’t, continuing his staring content with the ground and refusing to make eye contact.

“We have some things we need to talk about,” Phil said. “But everything will be fine, I promise.” Techno glanced towards Tommy before turning back to Phil and inclining his head. Whatever he’d communicated with the gesture, Phil answered with a stern shake of the head. 

“Will you be able to fly back?” Phil asked Wilbur, whose flimsy, scarred wings seemed to droop with the thought of another flight.

“I— yeah. I think that I can do it.” 

“No.” Techno said, receiving a middle finger from Wilbur.

“It’s fine, I’ve got you,” Phil said.

“Making me feel like a little kid again,” Wilbur muttered as Phil scooped him up. “Think you can manage it, old man?”

“Give me a nicer nickname,” Phil said. “Or I might be tempted to drop you.”

They turned to look at Tommy who was still sitting on the ash-covered grass. 

“It’s time to go home,” Phil said to him. 

“Home?”

“Home.”

Tommy grabbed the transmitter and lifted into the air, following Phil who barely struggled with the weight of another person. 

_ Home _ , he thought. It was the most beautiful word he’d ever heard.

_ Home. _

“Go take a shower,” Phil said to Tommy when they got back. “We’ll wait in the living room.”

And he did shower, far longer than necessary to wash the ash out of his hair, long enough to be an annoyance, not long enough to make Phil forget. No amount of time would accomplish that.

He trudged down the hall with a tangible reluctance, shivering. The cool air of the house was a sharp contrast to the flames, accentuated by his still-damp hair. When he entered the room, Phil glanced up and threw a blanket at him, nodding at the chair that Tommy had tended to commandeer in the weeks since his arrival. 

A mug in both hands, Wilbur walked into the living room. Compared to his usual animated self, he seemed rather ghostly, face pale and eyes shadowed.

“Are you okay?” Tommy asked.

“Flying’s a bit difficult for me, big man. But I make do.”

“Sorry,” Tommy said quietly, burrowing deeper into the blanket. “Didn’t mean to worry anyone.”

“It’s a good thing to have people that worry about you, I think,” Wilbur said. “Here. Phil said you would be cold.” A mug of hot chocolate was pressed into his hands. Phil was right; after dying, his body seemed to yearn for the warmth that it had possessed for just a moment. He wondered how Phil’d known.

“Sorry, by the way,” Wilbur said as he plopped down next to Techno on the couch. “I didn’t say anything when I saw you come back the other night but I didn’t quite feel like keeping it a secret when I saw you leaving again.”

“It’s okay,” Tommy replied. He couldn’t bring himself to be upset. He just felt strangely numb and stupid for not being more careful. 

There was a silence, almost comfortable. Then Phil broke it. 

“Do you want to tell them or should I?” 

“Is there a not-talk-about-it option?”

“No.” Phil didn’t say it cruelly, but his voice was firm. 

“You, then.”

“If we could have some explanation for our little midnight outing, that would be great,” Techno said, taking a sip of what looked more like coffee than hot chocolate and sporting his usual glower. 

“Alright then — Tommy’s a phoenix,” Phil said. Tommy let out a cough as he choked on a mouthful of his drink. Waited for someone to react with disgust or anger.

“Huh,” Techno said finally. “That’s cool. Didn’t know that they let you guys out anymore.” The blanket rustled as Tommy shifted uneasily, thinking of the disconnected transmitter in his bedroom upstairs. The Doctor wouldn’t be suspicious unless he kept it off past the early hours of morning, at least.

“They don’t like us talking about it.”

“They?”

“The Agency.”

“I knew a Phoenix once,” Phil mused. “Parents turned him into the Agency and no one ever saw him again.”

“That’s how it tends to go,” Tommy said glumly. 

“Why are you here?” Wilbur asked.

“It’s where they store us phase-twoers in between tests,” he said, stunned as the words came out of his mouth. He tried not to think of loaded guns and bleeding out on a white-tiled floor.

“Tests?” Phil asked. Tommy’s eyes flicked up to meet those of the older man and saw only concern. They weren’t mad. So he kept going, letting out the words that he’d been stopping up for years. 

“The Agency uses us to search for immortality. They raise us until we’re ten and after that, they put us in foster care and don’t deal with us unless they need more results.”

“Tests?” Wilbur echoed softly, asking a different sort of question. 

“They kill us,” Tommy said flatly. “Over and over again.” 

“Oh,” said Wilbur, inhaling sharply. “C’mere,” he said, gesturing to the spot on the couch in between Wilbur and Phil. Tommy didn’t want to move, felt frozen. But it would be better if he did what they wanted. 

He trudged over and plopped down in the space that they’d made, staring down at his hands, the floor, anywhere that wasn’t at the faces of the other men. 

“Toms, look at me,” Wilbur said. And he always expected the worst so when all Wilbur said was, “Is it okay if I give you a hug?” he blinked in disbelief. Then he nodded.

And it’d been a while since Tubbo had hugged him, a lifetime since he’d felt the touch of someone else that wasn’t a fist in the face. Wilbur was warm and he leaned into the boy’s sweater. Techno patted his head awkwardly before getting up for a refill. 

“What!” he said when Phil raised his eyebrows, “It’s not like we’re goin’ back to sleep, right?”

Tommy realized that he’d never felt safer than in the arms of someone he’d known for less than a month. It didn’t seem so strange when held next to the life he’d lived. 

“When’s the last time that someone took care of your feathers?” Phil asked. 

“Oh,” he said, not moving. “They’re fine I think. They must get healed a lot.”

“Have you looked at them?” 

The truth was that he tried not to because in the mirror, they looked dim and unhealthy. He knew that in children’s homes as a kid, he’d lived in constant fear of sparks but these days he rarely saw them light up.

His rebirth as a child had been instantaneous but these days, he sometimes laid in the field all night before he woke up alive. And his body was always felt healed afterwards but his wings were strangely tired, the sensation of pins and needles spilling into his feathers. 

Tommy was good at lying to himself. 

“They’re fine,” he repeated. 

“No one’s really taught you about being a phoenix, have they?” Phil asked. Tommy shook his head. 

“The power to avoid death doesn’t come out of nowhere.” Phil ran his hands over Tommy’s wings while he spoke, feeling gently for loose feathers. “It comes from your wings. After all, they’re the only thing that makes you different.” He set a couple of primaries on the end table and Tommy noticed how raggedy and tired they looked. Like him. Ha. 

It was hard to concentrate on Phil’s voice as the comforting feeling of his wings being touched washed over him. Not even Tubbo had done that. 

“And when you use that power too much,” Phil continued. “They can’t support it anymore.”

He sighed. 

“Your wings don’t heal like the rest of you. And eventually, they won’t be able to heal you either. You’ve died too many times for them to keep up.”

“Oh,” Tommy said. It wasn’t something he’d ever heard of before, but it wasn’t like he had planned to do much more than be the Agency’s test subject until he died. “I’m expendable anyways, it’s alright.” 

It was the truth. He didn’t know what the Agency had planned but they certainly weren’t going to let him go free when he was an adult. Still, he’d gone so long without worrying about real-death that the thought was jarring. 

“Tommy!”

“What?”

“Don’t ever say that. You’re not expendable,” Phil said. Wilbur rubbed his back in a circular motion while Tommy sniffed and tried his best not to cry. 

“There are hundreds of kids like me,” he mumbled, tears slipping onto the yarn of Wilbur’s sweater. “The only thing I seem to be good at is getting caught.” 

“Not true,” Wilbur whispered conspiratorially. “I’m pretty sure you made Tech laugh the other day. Never seen him do that before.”

“I heard that!” yelled a voice from the kitchen.

“Ears like a fucking bat,” Wilbur muttered. “Anyway, you’re stuck with us now. So you better get used to people being here for you.”

“I know we haven’t known you for that long but we care about you, Tommy. And we’ll be here for as long as you’ll have us,” Phil said softly. If that was true, Tommy decided that they might be trapped with him forever. 

Phil had stopped picking through his wings and started scribbling on a scrap of paper, writing sentences of almost unreadable scrawl. Tommy watched him, head against Wilbur’s chest, until his eyes started to slip shut and the sun started to rise. 

“Do we have to go to school?” Techno asked, leaning into the room from the hallway. 

“No,” Phil said, focus still on the notebook.

“Good,” Tommy said, grinning sleepily. “I didn’t do any of my homework.”

“You’ll be the end of me,” Phil said, head in his hands. But he was smiling too. 

The next week was strange, days full of school and normal interactions and nights full of wrapping the transmitter in cloth and hiding it in his room before letting stories about the Agency spill out of his mouth. He hoped that they wouldn’t notice how regularly it was disconnected; they had to have bigger things to focus on. Like The Doctor had said, he was a strange kid, They’d given him the buckle for a reason.

It wasn’t hard to talk about the nursery, Tubbo, the classroom and the aviary. Those were just childhood memories, some tinted by the loss of his parents but happy for the most part. For over five years, the Agency had been something he called home.

Then he told the stories of his foster families, stories that couldn’t have been that alarming to a foster father and children from the system. The stories of getting caught and worked and beat up — those were harder to tell. 

He didn’t tell them about his first death for almost a week. And that same night, he told them about his second and third. Even then, his language was stilted and he had to stop when he felt on the verge of panic. 

Outside of their conversations, he avoided the thoughts of guns, of white tiles and rocky cliffs. Things that were best to forge, though he knew he wouldn’t be able to push them from his head completely, as hard as he tried.

Techno’s fists were always clenched when he told stories, so hard that his knuckles turned white. 

“It’s not you I want to punch,” he would say reassuringly when Tommy asked about it.

Phil was in his office most of the day, typing or on calls with people for work. Tommy asked Wilbur what Phil’s job was one day and Wil said that he was a journalist. 

“A good one, too. Well-known. Used to cover wars overseas before he came home and took us in.”

The notes Phil had been taking made too much sense then. 

He stood in the doorway to Phil’s office, watching the fluorescent white light flicker across the man’s face from a computer screen and waiting to be noticed. Phil was too engrossed in his work and Tommy gave in, clearing his throat so that the other man would look at him. 

“Don’t tell me that you’re going to try and change things,” he said. 

“They weren’t supposed to tell you about it,” Phil said, eyes shadowed and stubble growing into what looked more like a beard. He looked tired. 

“They didn’t. I figured it out myself.”

“Oh.”

“It’s dangerous,” Tommy said, shifting from foot to foot. “Trying to tell people about the Agency won’t work. You’re going to get yourself killed.”

“So would it be better to let them kill innocent children over and over again?” Phil was careful not to raise his voice but Tommy could hear the undertones of barely-contained rage. “Would it be better to let them kill you over and over again?” 

Maybe Tommy would have given a different answer months ago. Probably not. He hadn’t had a solid sense of self-preservation in a long time. 

“If it means keeping you safe,” he said. “Yes.”

“If you care about us that much then think about our feelings. Wouldn’t you do anything for that friend of yours?” Phil asked. Tommy didn’t want to think about Tubbo being in danger. Phil was right, though. Tommy would do a lot of things for Tubbo. Almost anything. He was starting to think that Tubbo wasn't the only one he would make sacrifices for, though.

“Will I be able to stop you?”

“No.”

Tommy sighed. He thought of The Doctor holding a smoking gun, heard the echoing warning of the threat of death — at least he came back from gunshots. Phil and Wilbur and Techno wouldn’t. 

“You were better off without me. I don’t deserve this anyway.”

“I don’t think that that’s true,” Phil said. “You’re a good person. You deserve a good life.”

“Please be careful,” Tommy whispered. Phil tilted his head and the glint in his eye reminded Tommy of what Wilbur’d said — that Phil hadn’t always been a reporter sitting behind a computer at a desk. That he’d flown next to those fighting. That he was strong 

“Don’t worry,” Phil said. “People will listen.”

“Thank you,” Tommy said before stumbling down the hall and throwing himself onto his bed. If there was anyone he could trust it was Phil. But he didn’t want to lose them, didn’t doubt that the Agency could make them disappear. 

Wilbur’s guitar was a lullaby amidst his tumultuous thoughts. 

He dreamed of falling.

They watched him closely, saw how restless he got as the days passed, standing near windows or staring listlessly at the sky. 

Phil took him flying — though he never let Tommy drift away from him in the clouds. 

Techno helped him correct his fighting footwork and dragged a punching bag out of the basement. He practiced with it until his knuckles and muscles burned. The pink-haired boy was right; his approaches had needed correcting. To his dismay, his attempts at provoking fights went answered but he refused to give up. 

Wilbur started to teach him guitar and he played until his fingers ached and then until they didn’t.

And it wasn’t quite enough to stop the yearning he had, but it helped. Their warmth was like a cozy blanket or fuzzy socks, a safe warmth that refused to burn him. That didn’t mean that it was weaker than the flames. Just different. Maybe better. 

Listening to their laughter around the table one night, he realized that he no longer needed death to feel something good. That he could do it by himself. 

It seemed like the article was finished too soon. But his stories and Phil’s sources were expended. 

There was nothing else to write. 

The rumble of the car over the highway joined all of the other cars on the road, going places, following routines. This was not a routine trip. Phil’s knuckles were white on on the steering wheel and all of their faces were grim. Tommy was full of a nervous energy better suited for flying than sitting in a car. 

He kicked the back of Techno’s seat until the boy turned to glare at him, only resuming the rhythmic tapping when he’d turned back around. 

They were going to give the report in-person. To a lot of people, actually. A bag in between Wilbur and Tommy sat weighted with a pile of flash-drives. A pile of computer-chip salvation, what Wilbur might call it. 

It just made Tommy nervous. 

He’d tried to convince Phil to send it online, that there was no need to deliver the story. Phil said that this was something so important that he might need to convince them to print it — his higher-ups knew that it was en route but most of them didn’t know what it contained. 

“I need them to trust me on this, Toms. I need them to look at me and see that I’m serious,” he’d said. 

“Hardcopies are better,” Techno had supported. “Wouldn’t want to be stopped by government monitorin’ before we even got started.”

It didn’t stop an uneasy feeling from knotting in his stomach as they took the shortest route to Phil’s office, a canyon of skyscrapers that no one seemed to be using. 

He was about to tap on Phil’s shoulder and ask how much longer they had to go when his head snapped forward and the car careened towards the edge of the empty street, its tire rims screeching against the asphalt. 

He felt the impact in slow motion, watched the airbags deploy, their bodies slam forward. 

_ It was over _ , he thought. They’d been so close.

He blinked and everything was still, the radio still playing faintly, the song too full of static feedback to recognize. The front of the car bent into one of the buildings that lined the road, a tire strip tangled in its rims. 

A sob escaped from his mouth and his head pounded viciously. He seemed to be the only one conscious, watched as a string of blood fell from Wilbur’s head to to the floor. 

There was glass on his hands. He could feel its sharp edges. Like knives with no handles. 

He was dizzy but he told himself he couldn’t close his eyes. The world tilted. 

He blinked again and there was a white van on the road. 

Oh. 

A knock on the window. 

The Doctor, gesturing with a black pistol. 

His head spun and his heart sunk. He forced the door upon and stepped onto the road, glass spilling off of his lap. 

“Hello,” The Doctor said. Tommy lurched forward and used his wings to right himself. The shards crunched underfoot.

“How did you know?” he whispered. “I was so careful.”

“Oh Tommy. Stupid Tommy. You didn’t think that we would just let a specimen like you go without observation, right? We were always listening,” the man drawled.

He flinched. It was his fault, then. Of course it was. 

“Why did you let me get so close? I was almost there,” he croaked. “I was so close.”

“I was bored,” said the man. 

And that was that. All of his hope, his temporary happiness, a product of one man’s boredom. It stung more than it should have; for a moment, he’d imagined a life where he was content. Where he was free. 

The Doctor wrenched open the driver’s seat door and grinned as he flicked safety off. Tommy froze at the sight, unable to move.

“No!” he screamed, but a stain was already spreading across Phil’s shirt and the echo of the round reverberated in his head. This couldn’t be real. This was just another nightmare and any second Wilbur was going to hear him yelling and wake him up. 

It didn’t feel real, but he knew that it was. 

Surging forward, he knocked the man to the ground and hit his wrist hard, causing the gun to fly out of reach. It was a move that could have gotten him killed, something he wasn’t particularly concerned with. 

He darted backwards and grabbed the it off the ground. 

The Doctor stood, rubbing his arm where the strewn glass had cut into it and torn his signature lab coat. His posture was unafraid. 

“Do you want them to live?” he asked, nodding towards the unconscious bodies in the car, two that he could pretend were only asleep and Phil, who looked worse every second. 

“Yes,” he said, gun shaking in his extended hand. He’d never shot one before. 

“I’m a doctor, could save the one in the driver's seat. And I’ll leave them alone afterwards. All you have to do is get in the van.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Let’s just say that most people are a lot more fragile than you. Less lucky.” 

“I could shoot you.”

“You wouldn’t. And if you did, it wouldn’t change a thing. The Agency is a lot more than one man.”

“Fine,” he said, voice shaking to match his hands. “Promise that they’ll be okay.” He took a small step in the direction of The Doctor.

“You won’t know either way,” the man said. “Sure, I promise.”

Tommy looked at the people who’d started to become his family. The people that he'd realized he was completely willing to sacrifice his life for. And that was when he saw Phil’s wing twitch. A small, deliberate movement. It shook something loose, a tiny flame. Like a firefly, just out of reach.

A spark. 

Phil opened his eyes and saw Tommy’s widen, gave a small nod. 

Tommy had to be right, needed to be right more than anything else. 

He turned and aimed the gun at The Doctor, who raised his arms in surprise. 

“Don’t do this,” he said, warning obvious in his voice.

“You’re going to feel every second of it,” Tommy replied. 

Then he shot the doctor in the foot, his aim a miracle. As much as he wanted the scream of the pain to be his revenge, it didn’t make him feel better. Just sick. The man doubled over and Tommy ran past him to the van, looking for the nurses who would surely retaliate

No one was there — the interior empty and the engine running quietly. 

He did find a pair of handcuffs. 

“Where is everyone else?” he asked as he crushed the man’s cell phone and stripped him of his coat, locking his wrists with the cuffs. The man winced, but Tommy wasn’t sure of the cause — whether it was from the question or the bullet wound. 

“Wasn’t supposed to let you get this far,” he muttered. “So I had to deal with it myself.” 

“Bet you’re regretting it now — hmm?” Tommy asked sweetly, flapping his wings for momentum as he dragged the man to the side of the road. He could still save them.

The Doctor didn’t answer, just gritted his teeth in an animalistic snarl. 

“You’ve just killed the man that could have saved you — the one in the drivers seat — he doesn’t have long,” he said in a mocking tone. 

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Tommy answered before turning and gliding towards the crumpled car, but his heart stuttered — what if he’d been wrong? What if the spark had been a trick of the light or Phil’s nod had been telling him to get in the van? 

It was too late for doubt. 

“Phil,” he said, leaning into the car and holding the man’s head up. “Phil look at me.”

Phil turned his head and let out a weak cough. Blood spurted from his lips. His eyes were cloudy. 

“Tell me that I was right. Tell me that I made the right choice,” Tommy said frantically. The man opened his mouth but couldn’t seem to speak, so he closed his mouth and smiled faintly. 

And then he let out a long, wheezing breath and burst into flames. 

Tommy’s relief was like a splash of cool water, a breath of fresh air. Phil was a phoenix.

The night that he’d died in front of Phil — the man had held him without being burned, only his pants to show the singe marks. 

The nights that he'd told the stories — Phil had nodded in a sad but unsurprised way. A way that suggested he already knew most of what Tommy was saying. 

Phil knew more about phoenixes than Tommy’d ever seen in a library book or a lesson. 

Because he was one.

The flames enveloped them and the familiar heat curled around his body, but he refused to let go, cradling Phil for what felt like forever, sparks swirling around them. Then Phil was opening his eyes, the last licks of fire burning through his body as his unblemished form rose from the ash. 

“Tommy,” he said. “Tommy I’m so sorry that I didn’t tell you. Don’t be mad, please.” Tommy nodded mutely. Anger was the last thing on his mind, though he couldn't quite describe what he was feeling. 

“I escaped from them when I was seventeen — burned my tracker off and flew until I couldn’t anymore. I went overseas, changed my name, anything to stay off the radar. Every day, I thought that they would find me, probably a miracle that they didn’t.”

Tommy had stayed because of Tubbo. Really though, he’d stayed because he was afraid. 

“And I did so many things in the hopes of making this awful world a better place but the only thing I couldn’t bring myself to face was the Agency. I was too scared to do anything at all. At least, until you came.”

Tommy met his eyes. 

“Because then it wasn’t just about me, it was you. And all of the others that I'd tried not to think of. ”

“I’m so glad,” Tommy choked out. “I thought that maybe I’d killed you.”

“You did everything right, Toms.”

“Don’t think I’m not mad at you, though,” he said, head still spinning with the fact that Phil had been a phoenix all along, that everything would have been so much easier if he’d known the truth. “I hate it when people lie to me.”

“No more lies,” Phil said. “I promise.” He swung out of the car, ash following his movements. “We have to take the van. This is undrivable.”

He opened the backseat and lifted Wilbur in his arms, carrying him to the van and setting him gently in the backseat. Then he came back for Techno. Tommy held the flash drives to his chest like a life vest, walking back to where he’d left The Doctor.

The man, seeing Phil alive and well, slumped even further down the wall. “Shit,” he said, closing his eyes. 

Tommy smiled. “Get up.”

He pushed himself off the concrete and hobbled behind Tommy, head hanging. 

“You’re telling me that this story is so important that someone tried to stop you from delivering it?” a suited man asked. Phil managed a dignified nod despite his clothes hanging off him in singed tatters. 

Tommy disguised his laugh with a cough that turned into a real hacking fit.

Somewhere in a hospital room, Wilbur and Tech lay unconscious, safe in what he hoped was a haven. Phil’d said they wouldn’t be gone long.  The Doctor was there too, under too many drugs to be dangerous. By the time he was a risk again they would have succeeded or failed anyway. 

“Fine,” the suit-man said. “You’ve never given us less-than-perfect work. Will it be big?”

“Yes,” Phil said with confidence that only came from years of practice. “Get it out if you want the readers because this one’s not exclusive.”

The man nodded and strode away. 

Tommy trailed the bedraggled man into many offices, all of which seemed to expect him — though his state was a surprise. And they all agreed to publish the article; Tommy handed out flash drives like party favors. 

Maybe it was too early to hope but that didn’t stop him from doing so. 

Hope was the thing with feathers.

Hope was Phil. 

It didn’t matter that the Agency had held government officials in the palm of its hand for decades; once the stories were published, they denied any association. 

Turned out that calming the public outcry was more important than studying immortality. 

The Agency was engulfed in reporters, parents, well-meaning citizens. Lots of people disliked phoenixes but others, the ones that cared, had believed in the Agency. Thought that it had been for the best.

The studies were stopped, the organization disbanded. 

Hundreds of court cases open and closed; Tommy slept with the fact that somewhere in a cell alone, The Doctor sat on a small, white cot. He slept with the fact that the people who’d put him through hell were now going through it themselves. 

Some parents came forward. Others did not. The government created a program for phoenix-children, one that Tubbo and Tommy volunteered at in their free time. It was much happier than he remembered their own nursery being — the walls, rather than a stark white, were painted in swirling colors. 

Sometimes, he almost missed the anchoring sensation of the tracker, the familiar weight on his ankle. But what did anchors do? They held things down. 

And the longer he went without dying, the more he realized that real happiness was better than risking his life for a second of peace. The sensation of falling had lost its allure.

“Do you remember them?” Tommy asked Phil one night. They’d had a lot to talk about since Phil revealed — was forced to reveal — his biggest secret. Lessons and history that Tommy and Tubbo, who always seemed to be at Tommy’s side, had never heard. Arcane rituals for phoenixes that had only survived by word of mouth and been gathered by Phil during his travels. 

The things that they’d lost.

“My family?”

“Yes.”

“Of course I remember them, Toms,” Phil said, ruffling Tommy’s hair. “Because you’re my family. And Wilbur and Techno. And I could never forget you.”

“Ha! I’m unforgettable!”

A wide smile spread across his face, but it hadn’t been the answer he was looking for. He still searched for their faces in crowds and at the center where he worked, spurred by a spark of hope that maybe they’d come forward now that everyone knew the truth. 

He wouldn’t blame them if they didn’t. 

The ache to see them again would never fade completely but he didn’t have to face it alone anymore. 

A fishing trip where Techno threw him into the water mercilessly.

Flash. 

His first amusement park, first A in a class, first birthday with a cake and a party hat and little, colorful kazoos.

Flash. Flash. Flash. 

Playing the guitar with Wilbur, hiking in the mountains, flying his first competitive course. 

Forcing Tubbo to sing karaoke with him, switching Techno’s pink hair dye out for neon green in the middle of the night and sitting at the breakfast table in anticipation. 

Flash. 

He started to associate the light of the camera and the click of the shutter with happiness. With belonging. 

“You know, I think you’re running out of space,” he said as he held the ladder for Phil one day while the man hammered another nail into the wall, a framed photo balanced at the top of the ladder and waiting for display. 

“Impossible!” Phil replied. “There are a lot of walls in this house. Remind me to buy some more frames, though— we’re almost out of those.”

Tommy smiled.

He’d done it. He’d found his family; their memories spread out over the walls of the house. 

And he was free. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mwahaha phoenix!phil (: i know that was kind of sudden but i couldn't resist)
> 
> thank you so much for your support, it means the world to me -- your kind comments and feedback were so inspiring and the readers in this community are amazing regardless of whether they interact or not (YES, THAT MEANS YOU, DEAR READER!)
> 
> come yell at me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/ghostbandaidstwitter)!
> 
> please let me know if you liked this fic!! i love comments so so much. also, somebody should give me prompt suggestions because i don't know what to write next and am idea farming
> 
> <3


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